Berlin says new €150bn funding for defence industry should be open to non-EU partners, but Paris disagrees

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.08-050706/https://www.ft.com/content/76937db3-0b3b-44d4-9005-9709512acd53

A proposed €150bn injection into the EU’s defence industry has become a new flashpoint in a long-standing battle between France and Germany over the continent’s rearmament drive and whether it should include countries outside the bloc.

Spooked by US President Donald Trump’s threats to end generations of American protection, Europe has pledged to increase defence spending dramatically and scale up their domestic capabilities that have withered since the cold war.

Last week the European Commission proposed to raise €150bn that would be lent to capitals to boost their military production. While the broad idea has received unanimous political backing, the details are still being fleshed out, with heavy lobbying over whether the cash could be spent on arms made outside the bloc.

  • porompopmpom@lemmy.mlEnglish
    22·
    1 day ago

    You said I have a flat in Moscow because I don’t agree with your opinion. You throw terms like “false equivalency” hoping it sticks. I was talking about peace and you talk about counter invasion, not sure what the point in that is. Russia started the war so let’s invade them and show them is not very productive or reasonable. We seem to have diametrically opposed opinions on war in general.

    • CaptainProton@feddit.orgEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      The point in it is to create a permanent peace. You asked for a solution and I gathered you hadn’t heard that one before. I think your opinion on war is similar to Putin and Trump’s, in that you talk directly or otherwise in favor of a pyrrhic peace that only empowers the aggressor. The better solution, the solution available to any victim being cornered and no-one else to come help them, is to throw a damn punch, ideally a crippling one. There’s no moral equivalency between an aggressor forcing their target to capitulate and a defender forcing the aggressor to capitulate, that’s what makes your implications of such an equivalency false. I think you might be a Russian agent, (in spirit at least hence the hyperbolic image of you cowering in some oblast) because you cling to an anachronistic pacifism and stall genuine conversation and preparation for what’s to come.

      And it is coming, I think you know that.